#90: When Your Dream Stops Being Fun and Feels Like Too Much Effort

Have you been more focused on the effort of your dream lately than the fun of it? Are you constantly replaying that soundtrack of, "This is hard, like, so much harder than I thought," or, "This is taking so much longer than I thought it would"?

If you find yourself wondering how you ever thought your dream was going to be fun, you are in the right place today. Because today we're talking about how effort and fun, they actually go hand in hand when you're doing the reps to bring your dream to life.

We tend to assume that if something is worth doing, it should feel light — and the second it doesn't, we panic. But there's real research on this, and it says the opposite of what we assume. It's called the effort paradox, and it explains why the hardest part of your dream might be exactly what makes the reward feel real.

I'm also bringing in the IKEA effect — a study on why we love the things we build with our own hands, and the one condition that has to be true for that love to actually stick. Plus a simple seven-minute journaling exercise to help you find the fun again when it's gone quiet on you.

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE

1️⃣"This is hard, and this is fun." Two things, both true, at the same time. 

2️⃣ The fun has to be findable. That's the test. 

3️⃣ The more effort you put in, the more it's going to mean to you when it's done.

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:23

Hey, it's your friend and host Carleen. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast, and I am so happy that you've taken some time for yourself today to tune in. And you know, I always love to open these episodes with a question. And today that question is: have you been more focused on the effort of your dream lately than the fun of it? Like, are you constantly replaying that soundtrack of, "This is hard, like, so much harder than I thought," or, "This is taking so much longer than I thought it would"? If you find yourself wondering how you ever thought your dream was going to be fun, you are in the right place today. Because today we're talking about how effort and fun, they actually go hand in hand when you're doing the reps to bring your dream to life. And as always, I'm bringing in some research to back up what I think is going on for all of us when our dreams feel heavy or simply flat. But first, I've got a story to tell you, and then I promise we are going to get into the research and what it says and what you can do to shift out of the this-is-just-too-much-effort mindset Okay, so I have to talk about summer here in Tennessee, because it is so hot, and if you have a pool, you already know that a pool in July and August is not a luxury. It is actually survival here. And I have this memory that keeps showing up for me lately. My parents, they moved to a house that had a pool when I was in college, and so our summers were filled with weekend swimming and grilling out, and I was young and single back then, so I would just show up. I mean, the pool was clean, the coolers were stocked, the grill was hot and ready to go, and the sides and the snacks and the sweets, they were already made and sitting on the table like they just appeared out of thin air. And I did not think about any of that, not once. I just showed up, jumped in, and had fun. And then I got married and started a family, and we kept the tradition going. And those summer weekends in the pool are some of my favorite memories when the girls were young going to Grandma and Grandpa's And a few weeks ago, I told my mom something that I wish I'd said to her and my dad 30 years ago. I told her how grateful I am now for all the effort that they put into those days. Because at the time, I had no idea. I genuinely thought summer pool parties just happened. And here's the part that really gets me now, is those memories became something that I wanted to give to my grandkids, and that is exactly what my husband and I do for our family now. We built our house here in Tennessee with a pool. And now my husband and I, we are on the other side of it. Same job, totally different seat at the table. We're the ones filling the coolers, standing over the hot grill, and cleaning the pool. It's the same hours of invisible prep before a single person even shows up. So why the heck do we keep doing it? Well, why does anyone keep doing the work of hosting year after year when it would be so much easier to, well, just not? Well, you do it because once you're in that pool with your kids and with your grand babies splashing around on a Saturday afternoon in July, it's heaven. It's pure heaven. Every bit of the prep disappears the second you're in the water with the people that you love. That's what I've discovered, and that's the dichotomy that I want to talk about today. And I started calling this effortful fun, and here's what I mean by that. We tend to assume that fun equals easy. That if something is worthwhile, it should feel light, it should be effortless, and if it doesn't feel effortless, we assume something must be off, either with the activity or with us. But a lot of the things that actually satisfy us long term, you know, the things that we look back on and we think, "Oh, that mattered," those require real effort, sometimes hours of effort before the fun part ever starts. I wanted to know if I was just making this up in my head, so I went looking for the research. And it turns out there's a name for exactly this, and it's actually been studied for a while now. It's called the effort paradox. So Michael Inzlicht and other researchers, together they published a review on this in the journal called Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and their core finding goes against almost everything that we assume about effort. We treat effort as a cost, like something we're wired to avoid whenever we can. And that is true, that is how we're wired. But that's as far as it goes, because their research shows that the opposite is also true. Sometimes the exact same outcome feels more rewarding specifically because we worked harder to get there, not despite the work, but because of it. According to the research, one reason has to do with contrast. The effort itself feels a little unpleasant while you're in the middle of it, and that discomfort is exactly what makes what comes after feel bigger and sweeter and more earned. That pool doesn't feel like heaven in spite of the hours of prep beforehand. Some of that heaven comes from the hours of prep. I also found a second study that I wanna bring into this, because I think you might recognize yourself in this one. It's called the IKEA effect. So Michael Norton's research team ran a series of studies where people built things with their own hands. Think IKEA furniture, Lego sets. And then the researchers asked everyone to say how much they valued what they'd made. Turns out people valued their own creations, their crooked, amateur, definitely not professional creations, about as much as they valued the work of actual experts. So the labor itself created the love. Not the skill level, not the polish, just the fact that they had put in the work and made the thing themselves But here's the nuance, and I think this is the part that's so important if you're working on a dream right now. That effect only showed up when people actually finished what they started. So when people went to build something that was torn apart before they even started, and they made it halfway through, but they never completed it, the love disappeared. Effort on its own wasn't enough. The effort had to lead somewhere. I just wanna sit with that for a second because it really matters for something that I've been struggling with myself. So writing is my current dream in progress, as most of you know by now, and there are days I catch myself assuming that if the writing isn't flowing, if I'm not fully inspired, if I'm not fully in love with every sentence that I put down, then something must be wrong with me. M- maybe I picked the wrong book idea. Maybe I'm not actually a writer after all. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But what this research tells me is that the maybes probably aren't really about whether I love writing. I think they're about not having crossed a finish line in a while. It's easy to forget the effort was worth it when you haven't felt the payoff recently. And you know what? I see this exact pattern with my clients and the members inside my Dream Studio community all the time. A woman starts something like a business or a book or a certification or just a whole new chapter in their lives, and the first few weeks they feel amazing. Then the middle hits, the part where it's just work, and she comes to me and says something like, "I think I picked the wrong dream. This doesn't feel exciting anymore." And my first question is always the same: When's the last time you finished something? Not started, finished. Because nine times out of 10, it's been a while. She's been in the effort so long that she's forgotten what the reward on the other side feels like. She probably didn't pick the wrong dream. She's just due for a finish line. So writing, like hosting a pool party, like gardening, like training a puppy, like about 10 million other genuinely satisfying things that we choose to do, is both effortful and fun at the same time. Yes, it's hard to sit down some days. It's hard to open the laptop. It's hard to put the first word on the page. But it's also exhilarating, and it's a good use of my time, and it scratches an itch that I can't reach any other way. And compare that to what researchers call effortless reward. So scrolling on your phone is the obvious example. It gives you a little hit of pleasure, and it asks absolutely nothing of you in return. No skin in the game, no investment, no risk, and that's effortless reward. And that's exactly why none of it sticks with you. You don't remember the 45th reel that you watched last Tuesday night, but you do remember the garden that you grew from a seed. You remember crossing the finish line of that 5K. You remember the puppy that finally, finally stopped chewing your shoes. Effortful fun is the kind you remember. It deepens your whole experience of being alive, not just the five minutes that you spent doing it I wanna pause here because I don't want you to hear this the wrong way. This isn't permission to go muscle through every miserable, joyless thing in your life and say it's effortful fun. If a task is genuinely just misery with no payoff anywhere in sight, that's not this. That's just misery. Effortful fun still has the fun in it somewhere, even if it's buried under some sweat or some frustration, or some days you'd rather just quit. The fun, it has to be findable. That's the test ask yourself about whatever your dream is right now, is the fun in here somewhere, even if it's hard to find some days? Or has this turned into something that's just hard, full stop, with no joy anywhere underneath it? Because those are two very different situations, and they call for two very different responses. So if the fun is still in there, effortful fun is exactly the reframe that you need. And if the fun is genuinely gone, well, that might be a different conversation for a different day. Let me give you a few more examples of what this can look like, because your dream doesn't have to be a pool party or a book to count. Let's say you're training for a 5K or a half marathon in a body that's 50 or 60 years old and hasn't run in decades. That's effortful fun. How about starting a garden from seed instead of buying the starts that are already halfway grown? Effortful fun. What about finally learning the instrument you never got around to as a kid, and you're fumbling through the scales in your own living room? That's effortful fun also. How about getting certified in the thing that you've always wanted to teach or to coach, even though it means studying again after all these years? Oh, yeah, all that studying, effortful fun. How about restoring an old dresser piece by piece instead of ordering a new one online? That's effortful fun. Or how about hosting a holiday dinner completely from scratch, like you're doing the prep and all of it instead of taking the easy way out? That's effortful fun. You see where I'm going here, um, none of those are easy. Every single one of them is worth it. So here's what I want you to do this week. If you've been more focused on the effort of your dream lately than the fun of it, I have a little exercise for you. So you can find a quiet spot and grab an actual piece of paper, not your phone, and at the top, write one of these sentence starters, and then set a timer for, like, seven minutes and just write, stream of consciousness. Don't edit yourself. Don't stop to decide whether it's right or if it sounds good or whether it's worth keeping. Just write. The first sentence that you can finish is, "The effort is worth the reward if..." The effort is worth the reward if. Now, this is where you are going to define why this is important to you. That's what's happening with that one. The second sentence that you can finish is, "How I know I'm having fun is..." This might be leading to how you're feeling in the moment, so pay attention to your feelings when you're actually working on the dream. The third sentence that you can finish is, "If I could do anything, I would..." You're gonna be looking for the reward when you finish that sentence. Okay? Now, you can do one of these, you can do two of these, you can do all three of these, or you can spread them across three separate days. However you wanna do it, but don't skip this, because this is where you're gonna find out what you already know but you just haven't been able to see it. Okay, so I have two action items for you this week. First, I wanna remind you really quickly that if you haven't done so yet, to sign up for my new newsletter. It's called The Tuesday Letter, and it's totally free, and I share things there that are going on in midlife for me and for you that I don't share here on the podcast. So if you wanna be part of that conversation, you can sign up at coachcarleen.com/newsletter, or the link is in the show notes, and I'll be showing up in your inbox every Tuesday. Okay, here's your second action item for this week. Pick one dream that you've been putting off or one that you're actually in action on, and it's feeling like it's too much work, too much effort, and I want you to reframe it, like out loud, as effortful fun. Not, "This is hard." Instead, "This is hard, and this is fun," And both of those are true at the same time. Don't give up on your dream just because there's work involved. That was never the deal. The deal was always going to include effort. Try recasting it as effortful fun this week and see what shifts for you. And you know what? I think about my mom and dad a lot when it comes to this. All those years of prep that they put in so the rest of us could just show up and play, they never once made it look like a burden. They just did it over and over, summer after summer, because they loved us enough to do the effortful part so we could have the fun part. And you know what? They had a lot of fun, too, and that's what I want for you and your dream, a life where you can finally see the effort and the fun as the same thing happening at the same time. All right, my friend, I'll be here next week to welcome you into our next conversation the second that you hit play. Bye for now.

Carlene 16:53

oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.